Mastering the Metal: The Story of James Watson and Eddie Bravo

By Zack Moore, Eddie Bravo and James Watson

Over the last two decades, Eddie Bravo has been at the forefront of revolutions we’ve seen in the arts of fighting, comedy, and podcasting. But he wasn’t alone in his journey.

For just over a decade, James Watson and Eddie Bravo were inseparable: musical partners, work colleagues, roommates, and best friends. From metal to rap, our protagonists worked to master the art of music together.

Through the story of these past experiences in the pursuit of musical mastery, the reader will get to intimately understand Eddie Bravo and see how those experiences in his youth spent in music made him the man and martial artist he is today. Through the narration of our author, we get the complete picture of the private man behind the Eddie Bravo public persona.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Post Hill Press
• Release date: Mar 28, 2023
• ISBN: 9781637585818

Book preview

© 2023 by Zack Moore with Eddie Bravo and James Watson

All Rights Reserved

ISBN: 978-1-63758-580-1

ISBN (eBook): 978-1-63758-581-8

Cover design by Conroy Accord

Cover art illustration by Hannah Vandermolen

This is a work of nonfiction. All people, locations, events, and situation are portrayed to the best of the author's memory.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author and publisher.

Post Hill Press

New York • Nashville

permutedpress.com

Published in the United States of America

To Jamie, Luca, Mateo, and 10th Planet family.

—Zack

To the 17 fans of my music worldwide, y’all are my favorite people.

—Eddie

To my sweetheart.

—James

Contents

Chapter 1: The Introduction (Zack)

Chapter 2: The Music (Zack)

Chapter 3: Let There Be Rock (James)

Chapter 4: Little Rock, Arkansas (James)

Chapter 5: Meeting James Watson (Zack)

Chapter 6: Edgar Cano (James)

Chapter 7: James Discovers Rock ‘n’ Roll (James)

Chapter 8: Santa Ana High School (James)

Chapter 9: Training Partners (Zack)

Chapter 10: Resistance (James)

Chapter 11: The Rap Game (Zack)

Chapter 12: James Moves To Hollywood (James)

Chapter 13: Blackened Kill Symphony (James)

Chapter 14: I’m Alive (James)

Chapter 15: Laurel Canyon and Religion (Zack)

Chapter 16: The Definition of Quality (Zack)

Chapter 17: The System (Zack)

Chapter 18: The Master (Zack)

Endnotes

Acknowledgments

Chapter 1

The Introduction

(Zack)

Thursday, January 27th, 2022

Could you please put a mask on? asked the Avis rental car employee.

My friend just told you that there are bed bugs on your bus. Let’s stay focused, I replied.

We are still on airport property, sir.

Please just give me the car that’s reserved for Zack Moore.

Welcome to Los Angeles, California.

A place where people from all around the world flock to be seen is being run by a fear so heavy that many are willingly covering their faces and consciously voting for more mandates, while they try to force the rest of us to take part in a lie they can’t let go of.

Cover my mouth.

Stick it in me.

Tell me what to do.

Govern me harder.

On some level, you can’t blame the businesses or employees in this climate. There’s real tyranny going on here. This is not Texas. It’s a tale of two distinct cultures in America, a split that can feel like it may never be resolved.

California businesses have a reasonable fear of potential consequences if they don’t comply completely. It doesn’t take coming to California to know that things are a bit odd here.

The only people in Texas that seem to still hold onto masks are the politicized administrators in charge of the big city public schools.

Hospitals don’t have a choice since the feds are forcing them to comply. The employees at Austin-Bergstrom International Airport don’t bother you for not wearing a mask. It isn’t until you get on the plane that things get weird.

Masks were never necessary, so the forced masking we’ve seen happen across America is just forced expression. They are a forced acknowledgment that we’re all taking part in this thing that we’re not supposed to tell the truth about and a form of religious garb for Godless people who think they’re too smart for religion.

Their desire to force participation in their new religion is a complete violation of our First Amendment and our personal sovereignty.

Even worse are the corrupt politicians forcing nonfunctioning medical products with thousands of associated potential health consequences from corrupt companies on the public. It’s a darker, and more obviously corrupt, form of forced expression.

States now decide which laws they do and don’t want to follow. Some states are determining you don’t have the rights granted to you by the Constitution with their attempts at forced expression as a condition of employment, education, or health care. California is one of those states.

New York is too. I went to my first Yankees game as a three-year-old. I taught myself to read by analyzing box scores in the local newspapers the morning after games, frustrated when a game ended too late to make the next morning’s paper. Yet during the 2021 season, I would have been relegated to the unvaccinated section of the stadium. Taking a product that was rushed to market became a requirement to take part in life.

This trip to Los Angeles was a trip back in time, a reminder of The Science of early June 2020, when we were told masks worked as Antifa riots broke out. This left-wing militant group had been wearing masks since 2017 to conceal their identities. It was a normalization of their preferred attire.

Of course, Americans were told masks didn’t stop transmission when their perceived usefulness could have been used to open up small businesses in March, April, and May of 2020.

Masks worked once they facilitated political events for a political movement whose supporters wanted to unseat a president they perceived to be the worst thing that ever happened to the country because their television told them so.

We were also told that racial justice protests couldn’t spread Covid. That was fun.

Traveling has taken on a new feel. I’m traveling in America, but aspects of it will make me feel like I’m in a foreign land.

Michael Plaster, an Austin native who moved out to Los Angeles a decade ago to pursue filmmaking dreams, flew in with me.

I’m a New Jersey native who moved to Austin after a childhood of visits and dreams of one day becoming a Texan. The dreams officially came true the day I looked down at a license four years ago with that beautiful five-letter word TEXAS in the top left corner, and my cauliflower ears below.

Plaster is Eddie Bravo’s primary documentarian, the videographer behind the Mastering the System series on the 10th Planet website, and a founder-slash-owner of The Grappling Network, a video platform with distribution across various online streaming services.

He was the first to properly explain to me how Chinese Communist Party (CCP) money could influence our industries like it had Hollywood.

The Grappling Network hopes to become the background noise at bars across the country as Americans hop off the traditional ball sports wave. The popularity of the three major American sports has been threatened by those sports leagues, and everyone in the media that covers them, going along with the totalitarian and divisive mainstream narrative. It’s to the chagrin of the average fan who expects sports to be an escape from their daily slog.

Sports are intended to be an inspiring experience by watching examples of the heights of human potential, but recently it has frequently turned into an extension of the politics that audiences head to sports to avoid. Fighting has become a nice replacement for a lot of fans, something real. A sport with athletes who are not completely beholden to a big sneaker deal that is built on questionable labor practices—athletes who still have real opinions, rather than what you hear at pro-ball sports press conferences.

Legacy news networks, Hollywood, American-based multi-national corporations (whether Silicon Valley, the apparel industry, or professional sports leagues), academic institutions from universities down to elementary schools, and establishment politicians are all part of the narrative.

Once you’ve seen it, you see it everywhere. They all have the same opinions.

Pro-lockdown, pro-riot, pro-mask, pro-vaccine mandate, and so on. We know all of their opinions now. They’ve made sure to tell us.

Each company is always working and positioning itself via public statements to maximize their future environmental, social, and governance (ESG) score, a worldwide social credit score standard for corporations.

ESG is a set of standards for a company’s behavior used by socially conscious investors to screen potential investments.

In a tweet from March 2, 2022, mathematician, author, and social critic James A. Lindsay says the ESG score exists for three reasons:

1.A sword, to implement divide-and-conquer and box out competition.

2.A shield, to look morally virtuous while doing it.

3.To install arbitrary power, diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI), ESG, and other political officers and to enforce compliance with its arbitrary standards.

The point of the ESG is to give people like Klaus Schwab of the World Economic Forum infinite power over everything and everyone. Politicians just come out and say it now: the goal is a new world order.

It exists to enforce market actors to fall in line for global money while pretending to serve some incoherent vision of a greater good. Do so and you too shall profit.

It doesn’t matter if your food product is filled with cancer causing chemicals or your new pill kills people, your company hash-tagged Black Lives Matter on Twitter.

The propaganda push hasn’t stopped since March 2020.

In the non-digital world, we get constant reminders of these politics every time we see a perfectly healthy twenty-something with a mask, the Democrat MAGA hat, on outside during a bright, sunny day. Walking alone.

Politics are everywhere now. They’ve become unavoidable. My intention isn’t to be political, but to not acknowledge the environment we exist in at this moment in history is to not tell the story of what we’re living through. The nature of reality itself is now a political conversation. There is no explaining where we are in early 2022 without discussing the experience of the Covid cold war.

We can’t forget this. We can’t forget who did this to us. We can’t let history be rewritten.

Of course, to be Eddie Bravo is to be impacted by this.

We’ve all been impacted.

Plaster and I hopped in my rental car and set our GPS in the direction of 10th Planet Headquarters in downtown Los Angeles.

This was my second trip to train at 10th Planet Headquarters and my first to Eddie’s nightly 8:45 p.m. competition class. We stopped at Starbucks for post-flight caffeine and something light to eat. From the drive-thru, we could see the sparkling new SoFi Stadium where the Super Bowl was played two weeks later on February 13th, 2022.

I didn’t know this at the time. I hadn’t watched a game all season.

Previously, my focus as a writer was on the world of NFL salary caps and player contracts: how teams spent their money and determining, then communicating, which spending patterns seemed to have the most success.

It was Moneyball for football. I was working to see what was being undervalued and what kind of decisions created the greatest return on investment, thus increasing an organization’s probability of securing a Super Bowl championship.

This pursuit was guided by a dream, a goal of becoming an NFL agent or working in an NFL front office, the career path I saw forward with my experiences around the game as a college football player.

Now I don’t care for any of it.

Taking the exit off Interstate 110 and pulling into downtown Los Angeles, Plaster pointed out a building on the corner that was delayed for a few years while Donald Trump was president because his administration had reworked trade deals that slowed the flow of Chinese money in American building projects.

Joe Biden’s administration turned that faucet back on. The Big Guy probably got his 10 percent somewhere along the money trail too.

All of it just feels like more evidence of my conspiracy theory that Covid-19 is a war between a largely unsuspecting, unknowing global citizenry and the Chinese Communist Party, World Economic Forum, and BlackRock types with the established elements of the world’s political and corporate classes, especially here in America.

From Nancy Pelosi to the Mitt Romney-types around the world, from Nike to Adidas, from The Wall Street Journal to the New York Times, from the Celtics to the Lakers—they’re all bought and paid for.

Their goals are diametrically opposed to the people’s goals: lockdowns, silencing dissent on social media in the name of safety, endless arguments over masks to provoke and distract citizens from dealing with more pressing issues, Black Lives Matter, and Antifa-fostered riots, mail-in voting, and so on.

They sold out and consistently attack our nation’s most foundational principles: speech, guns, due process.

You can tell who the bad guys are because they tell you they are every time they push woke politics. It became pretty simple in 2020. The woke politics are a signal for us to distrust.

There are vaccine mandates that push every potential dissenter out of entire industries, including our military and health care. It’s all done for products that are only efficacious in providing profit for the connected, establishment class of America.

Pfizer paid the largest criminal fine in United States history for false advertising; yet people are supposed to just blindly trust them because Hunter Biden’s dad and a bunch of other good-for-nothing lifetime politicos said so.

The list of things that benefited this one agenda is long, and they have attacked the rights of those who oppose them in any way, large or small. That is cancel culture: the effort to render people this group disagrees with as unfit and unable to produce and acquire resources in their given field.

Where the old school communists would kill you, these communists create circumstances where you will be unable to survive, and they hope you’ll finish the job for them via suicide or overdose (two American problems that haven’t gotten better over the last two years).

Vaccine mandates are the next step in cancel culture, making your silent dissent, or simple critical thinking, punishable. It’s an attempt at taking personal autonomy away from you and your children with the help of the pharmaceutical industry that created the opioid epidemic we are now living, and dying, through.

At the time of this trip, Canadians can’t go to a grocery store without a vaccine passport. Going to a restaurant can also require a vaccine passport in Los Angeles.

I get shocked looks for my maskless face in convenience stores and am forced to wear a mask to legally buy cannabis, a hilarious irony.

The week leading into Super Bowl Sunday saw a vote to extend the State of Emergency for California, while the state prepared to host seventy thousand at SoFi Stadium.

Our moral betters, including the CCP’s favorite American athlete LeBron James, were seen maskless all game in a city where the peasants can’t get a drive-thru coffee without one.

Ellen DeGeneres enjoyed the fresh air in the stands, while audience members in her studio have been masked.

Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti was seen at the game not following his own orders.

Gavin Newsom made a maskless appearance at the 49ers vs. Rams NFC championship game the weekend I visited. Garcetti was maskless in a photo with Magic Johnson, then he publicly claimed that he was holding his breath while his mask was off.

Hilarious.

None of this is supposed to make sense. Letting the citizens know that you don’t have to follow the rules that you make and enforce like a tyrant is the point. That’s all.

Making people do things that make no sense makes them more likely to do things that make no sense, like taking your shoes off at the airport.

Confusion, demoralization, and distractions are key.

The creep is key.

The crises to justify the creep and the creep comes like the slow intensification of the squeeze on a good rear naked choke: Ten percent, twenty percent, forty percent…seventy percent…tap or nap.

To speak about this time is to speak of politics. The early 1940s are remembered for the last World War, so too shall be this time.

To exist is to be affected, the degrees vary based on where you live, who your surround yourself with, and what you do for work.

It’s a line of demarcation in our lives, an experience that changed all of us in some way. We saw elements of a near-death experience at the outset with our lack of knowledge of what virus might be coming to our shores, followed by the fear of recognizing the lengths that corrupt entities were willing to go to in order to see an agenda win out.

Being Eddie during a time where the mob was looking for scalps makes for an interesting experience. He has generally kept a low profile as the previous two years illustrated to him the beauty in the simplicity of his life with his wife, son, friends, black belts, and team. He’s not trying to convince anyone of his beliefs anymore; he’s just going to exist with the good people he has around him.

If you can’t figure it out now, he’s not going to be the one to convince you. He’s detached from the emotion of it, free from caring what others think and continuing to build a life where he can’t be impacted by what those others think.

Early in the Covid event, or Event 201 as the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, the World Economic Forum, and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation called their October 18, 2019 planning meeting, Eddie was frustrated with Moonheads who were going along with the narrative.

Moonheads are what we call the black belt business owners who run each of the one hundred-plus 10th Planet Jiu Jitsu schools around the world. This is the organization a thirty-three-year-old Eddie Bravo founded immediately following his submission victory over Royler Gracie at ADCC (Abu Dhabi Combat Club) in 2003. Each school is called a Moon.

10th Planet Austin, under the leadership of Curtis Hembroff and Gabe Tuttle, had broken into smaller units to continue the training momentum that we had all worked very hard to build as individuals in our own journey, as a team, and as a community.

Guys and girls were training at satellite locations but also training in small groups in the gym the whole time. I trained with Eddie’s brown belt, Manny Chavez, who would become our Moonhead at a new Round Rock location in September 2020. It felt like we were practicing our religion in some country that had banned our religion. We were sparring in the garage, trying to stay quiet.

Thankfully, the neighbors were cool.

Some other 10th Planet schools had no plans of reopening yet and weren’t doing all they could to serve their community. Our role is to be the space where people come to forget about their problems and improve themselves; their space for therapy.

And people had a lot of problems they needed to forget about.

The government was threatening Eddie’s livelihood, plus the careers of many people he cared about. Eddie was left wondering if some of his black belts truly listened and learned what he was teaching, to not believe things just because someone else said them, but to look into it and find out for yourself.

This was a stressful time, and guys like us were already at our wits’ end. The story the mainstream establishment was telling during this time has, over time, been proven to be a lie in every meaningful way. But for us, there were too many holes in the story already; we knew too much. And over time, a crazy conspiracy theorist like Eddie Bravo would be proven prescient.

A major moment for me was UFC President Dana White’s press conference after the UFC was the first major sport to return to action in May 2020. This was months before the other sports would.

After the UFC Fight Night on May 13th that was headlined by the Glover Teixeira TKO victory over Anthony Smith, a reporter asked Dana White how he felt about a New York Times article that was critical of the UFC’s execution of their return to fights with event UFC 249. As White pointed out, this writer had never written about the UFC before, but now he was going to impose his politics on the situation, which was getting him a lot of attention.

Clicks.

A huge factor of the Covid-19 response was politicized journalists maximizing their clicks throughout the event by flooding the market with takes that would evoke the maximum level of fear for the virus or maximum fear for the social consequences of disobeying the authorities they agreed with.

Mainstream journalists would openly mock the Covid-associated deaths of people who didn’t support Covid lockdowns with the same unquestioning ferocity that they did.

An interim lightweight championship match between Justin Gaethje and Tony Ferguson headlined UFC 249. Tony had already won an interim title in October 2017, but was stripped of it due to a freak knee injury.

After Tony earned that belt, Eddie put his own black belt around Tony’s waist. This was the black belt he received from Jean Jacques Machado upon his own return from that fateful ADCC, a great sign of respect for a student.

White responded to the reporter’s question by saying, Oh, fuck that guy.… I don’t give a shit what that guy thinks, what he has to say, or what he writes. Good for him. He’s pulling good traffic.

The reporter began, Do you not worry about…

White shut him down by saying, I don’t give a fuck.

Fair enough…

Don’t give a fuck, White repeated with an intense stare.

It was metal.

In mid-May 2020, 10th Planet Austin reopened to the public. There were no masks, no changes other than us using the back door to enter. We added a liability waiver that everyone needed to sign upon their first visit to the school.

We celebrated our return with a belting ceremony where I earned my purple belt, which comes after white and blue, but before brown and black. It provided me an opportunity to step up to a bigger role as a leader—a step closer to being a made man.

From my perspective, a blue belt seems to be earned when you have illustrated that you’ve made a lifestyle commitment to the sport. Purple belts are said to be reserved for blue belts who have illustrated a commitment that has them on the path towards black. You have proven yourself to be more than capable.

Brown belt seems to be for those that hit that next level of technical understanding. Brown belts are purple belts, but better in all the important ways, while black is a total mastery of the mental and physical side of the sport. Black belts are the kind of coaches Eddie can trust to properly program the students with all of the best that the system has to offer and fill the leadership role that the belt represents.

The black belt is a huge stamp of approval. Coaches don’t want to give those out to people who might sully the reputation of that black belt for everyone else in the system and those in the know. Your coaches are going to have to trust that you’re going to stay committed to the path, you’re going to stay sharp, and you’re going to stay committed in your focus on the evolution of the sport.

After promotions, my coach Curtis returned home to Alaska with his wife Priscilla for a year to try and serve his Kenaitze Indian Tribe, a longtime goal of his, to bring back what he had learned outside his tribe to serve his people. He left all of us to carry forward what he started.

Four years prior, in late 2015, Curtis had come out from Los Angeles and planted our 10th Planet flag in the middle of Texas and quickly built a formidable team with multiple schools—a remarkable leader. Originally, 10th Planet Austin was across the street from where we are now, housed in the Joe Rogan-affiliated Onnit Gym.

As we got back into the gym regularly, I began to see that everyone there had a similar perspective. We weren’t sure what was happening, but we were done listening. We knew the things we were told by our society’s formerly trusted institutions were not true.

With everything else going on, our gym environment was the only place that felt real. I’m sure that was lifesaving for a lot of people, at our gym and at others that did the same.

Since that first day back in May 2020, our school has doubled in size, added that Round Rock location, and is in the process of adding two to three more locations in the next two years. We attracted more people to our tribe, more people who know that you must be willing to die if you want to live.

These were people who found training important enough to move their lives from California or New York to come train with us, people who trusted the 10th Planet name and what we were building in Austin.

The Summer of Love hadn’t kicked off yet, so while I watched White’s response and thought the media’s reckoning was right around the corner, a long series of distractions and ways to prolong the pandemic had slowed that reckoning down.

As we began to realize that Texas, Georgia, and other states that had reopened for two, and then three, weeks with no wave of the dead bodies that the CCP-influenced and allied corporate media in America promised us, the establishment’s narrative took damage.

But George Floyd’s death and the subsequent riots provided not just a distraction, but a Covid case bump through the summer to help carry Covid fear to the mail-in ballot election through case counting. And there was a lot of fraudulent counting going on that year.

On June 1, 10th Planet Long Beach was burned down and destroyed. Everything was lost and